By now, you probably know all about the North Korean government effort to stop Sony from showing the comedy movie about the assassination of their leader. This hacker action was an attack like that is very difficult to stop. Recent research by a Microsoft strategist and a security expert claim that to stop a $100,000 hacking effort, you would need to spend $3 million on protecting your systems. There are few business with those kinds of resources. 

So what can we learn from this? I see several important lessons besides the fact that you can get great publicity for your movie by poking fun at dangerous people!

1. Pay serious attention to security. Hackers are banging at your virtual doors all the time, day and night, so get sound advice and do what you can reasonably do to protect your systems.
2. Assuming the worst may happen, change your habits so you use more voice and in-person visits for communications that are sensitive. In Sony's case, tens of thousands of emails were released, some with inappropriate, secret or character damaging content.
3. Train and retrain your people about clicking on links or attachments to email. Ransomware would never succeed if users didn't click on an exploit. And the same goes for most hacks. The root cause usually is people who let the bad-guys exploit their inexperience and lack of knowledge. 
4. If you have truly sensitive information, consider keeping it off-line. The old sneaker-net, moving files from user to user via physical media, may be worthy of a renaissance for super sensitive information. 
5. Consider proprietary CMS software or website builders for your website that don't allow anyone access to the code. If you must use open-source software for your website, be sure to enable auto-updates. Sure they break the site sometimes, but that's better than getting hacked.

So what's in common with most of these ideas? It's people. People are the reason most breeches occur. If we are to foil these hackers, education and training are the easiest ways to succeed. So get training and good luck out there! The bad-guys are busy, busy, busy.

If you have any questions for 111 web studio about this issue or if you'd like to consider a first-class proprietary website builder with easy-to-use content management and lots of features built for business, give us a call at 877.397.7695 or contact us and we'll be happy to tell you all about Build111. It's all that and more.